Abuses by the U.S. military have left a dirty stain on the reputation
of this nation -- another cost of an immoral foreign policy.

By Robert Scheer

May 5, 2004 | President Bush is again refusing to take responsibility
for any of the horrors happening on his watch. This time it is
the abuse of Iraqi prisoners carried out by low-ranking military
police working under the direct guidance of military intelligence
officers and shadowy civilian mercenaries. Our president launched
this war with the promise to the Iraqi people of "no more
torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone."
What went wrong?

The president has called the now exposed pattern of violence
an isolated crime performed by "a few people." Yet
the Pentagon's own investigation of the incident shows that not
only was the entire Abu Ghraib prison out of control, but it
was also the MPs' immediate military superiors who "directly
or indirectly" authorized "sadistic, blatant and wanton
criminal abuses" of the prisoners as a way to break them
in advance of formal interrogations.

"Military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. government
agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical
and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses,"
says the report. The report, completed in March and kept secret
until it was revealed on the New Yorker Web site on Friday, also
stated that a civilian contractor employed by a Virginia company
called CACI "clearly knew his instructions" to the
MPs called for physical abuse.

Furthermore, in a statement released Friday, Amnesty International
reported that in its extensive investigations into human rights
in post-invasion Iraq, it "has received frequent reports
of torture or other ill treatment by coalition forces during
the past year," including during interrogations, and that
"virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill treatment
has been adequately investigated by the authorities."

Recall that a key excuse for the U.S. invasion was to ensure
the safety of Iraqi scientists and others in the know so that
they might feel free to reveal the location of weapons of mass
destruction or evidence of Saddam Hussein's potential ties to
al-Qaida. Shockingly, some of those scientists are now in coalition
prisons, even though the weapons clearly don't exist.

In this context, of course, it makes sense that U.S. interrogators
would feel enormous pressure to use any means necessary to verify
the absurd claims made so aggressively by the president and his
Cabinet before the war. Far from the jurisdiction of the U.S.
legal system, they apparently felt quite free to approve techniques
clearly banned by war crimes statutes.

Yet, astonishingly, weeks after the Pentagon's own damning
internal report on the torture at Abu Ghraib, and several days
after CBS's "60 Minutes II" broke open the story worldwide
by showing those horrific photos, Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld still had not been briefed on the report, a spokesman
said Sunday. Similarly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Gen. Richard B. Myers, admitted Sunday that he hadn't yet bothered
to read the 53-page report filed by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M.
Taguba, even though he had successfully requested that CBS delay
its "inflammatory" broadcast. This shows far more concern
for public relations than for finding out the truth.

How could it be that the top officials responsible for the
military were not themselves interested in keeping abreast of
the investigation -- even after the story had exploded into a
global scandal? After all, an ambitious promise to bring democracy
and the rule of law to Iraq became the ex post facto rationale
for the invasion, once it became clear that the earlier claims
of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to al-Qaida
were a fraud.

So it should have been a clear and high priority to make certain
that Iraqi prisoners incarcerated in Saddam's most infamous prison
did not receive the same brand of "justice" the dictator
had been doling out for decades. That they did is now a deep
and dirty stain on the reputation of this nation.

Yes, it's great that we are still worlds away from being Nazi
Germany, Stalinist Russia or Saddam's Iraq. We are a free society
in which, it is hoped, truth eventually comes out, and thanks
to what seems to be one brave whistle-blowing soldier and a responsible
officer to whom he reported the torture, these crimes have come
to light. Those are the acts of true heroes, and we should be
proud of them.

Yet, before we go overboard in celebrating our virtues, let's
admit that Americans too can be "evildoers," especially
when we embrace, as the president consistently has done, the
terribly dangerous idea that the ends justify the means.

The ultimate cost of a foreign policy based on blatant lies,
and one that equates military might with what is right, is that
the brute in all of us will not inevitably lie dormant.